


Tempo.

by Alcalexandria



Category: Dark Fate - Fandom, Terminator (Movies), Terminator - All Media Types, Terminator Dark Fate, Terminator: Dark Fate
Genre: Angst, Bittersweet, F/F, Future War, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Private Bunker time, Slow Dancing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-30
Updated: 2020-08-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:34:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26197207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alcalexandria/pseuds/Alcalexandria
Summary: A Resistance without dancing is not worth leading.
Relationships: Grace Harper/Dani Ramos
Comments: 10
Kudos: 40





	Tempo.

**Author's Note:**

> Any feedback is hugely appreciated, it makes it a million times more rewarding to post something.

“What are we listening for?” Dani asks.

Grace looks up, still listening, and raises a hand – _wait._

The Commander folds the dossiers in her hands closed and pushes them away. She sits back in the sturdy old chair, her curiosity piqued.

There’s a rare lightness about Grace just now that’s good to see - she wasn’t often inclined to whimsy. Just this once then, if she wants an hour of Dani’s time, Dani will make that hour for her, and the rest of the war can wait.

They were both run ragged lately, and the mood across the whole base generally had been oddly subdued. As though, Ramos has considered somberly, everyone else can somehow sense the tragedy only she and Grace know for sure is coming.

Grace shuts the hatch softly behind her and folds her frame the rest of the way in, still looking up at the ceiling expectantly.

A few moments later, a test tone comes over the comms speakers hanging high on the wall, and the tinnier, shittier one on Dani’s desk. She looks up too, intrigued.

The tone comes again. And then -

“Oh shit,” Dani says, her face lighting up in recognition.

\- and then, music. Drums and vocals upfront, something like string instruments behind.

Grace smiles triumphantly.

“Bullied the comms guys into it, but we weren’t sure it would work.”

Dani laughs with delight, and then again with disbelief.

“What is this song?”

“No idea,” Grace admits, still looking up.

“Where did you…?”

“I’ve been picking up CDs on recon runs. Most of them were busted, but a few were still in good enough shape for the guys to salvage something off them.”

Dani shakes her head in wonder.

“How long has that been going on?”

“Uh… A while. Mostly from truck wrecks and stuff, so I’m pretty sure it’s mostly old white guy rock. Sorry.”

Dani laughs.

It was. Some of the detail was lost on the intercom speakers, but she’s pretty sure she’s heard the moody guitar and not-quite-Elvis vocals before. She’d spent a lot of miles listening to old white guy rock on the road with Sarah once, years ago, and it brings back fond memories. Yes, she’d heard this guy before; she probably even knows his name if she thinks about it.

She’d heard music since Judgement Day too of course, over scavenged earphones or careworn individual instruments - but there was something special about hearing a whole song fill a whole room like this, with all this texture and depth. Even on these crappy speakers.

“Is everyone hearing this?” she asks, just because she probably should.

“Uh, no, it’s a direct line in,” Grace says.

Orson? No, Orbison, she remembers, a name she’d never heard anywhere else. Something Orbison. Bob, Tom…

“- But the guys said any other signal will break into it, I checked,” Grace adds a moment later, in a rush.

Dani laughs.

“That’s very thoughtful, thank you.”

She comes out from around her desk and leans against it thoughtfully.

“We could maintain a channel like this permanently you know. A radio station for everyone, for morale.”

“Oh,” Grace says, “Yeah, you could.”

She looks at Grace again, and sees she looks a little dented.

“But this wasn’t for everyone, was it?”

“No,” Grace says, relieved - and embarrassed to be _so_ relieved - to be understood.

“I’m sorry, it’s just so clever, I got carried away.”

Grace smiles.

As light as she seems to be, Dani can see how tired she is around the eyes. Things are kicking into high gear, and everyone is feeling the strain. The machines are moving at speed now, and Dani must manoeuvre constantly to keep ahead of them. It has always been a race, and now both she and the enemy seem to sense the finish line approaching.

Grace knows what that could mean for her; she seems every bit as eager to embrace it as Dani is to reject it, resist it.

As desperate as that makes her to keep Grace close, and safe, she simply can’t. She’s too good at what she does - too often the difference between a dozen lives or deaths - to keep her on base, even if there was any hope in hell of convincing her to stay. Dani hates it, but she has no choice – what Grace can do now could also very well be the last chance they have to change something, to make the difference that saves her _own_ life. That would be worth the world.

It means too that she’s in near constant demand somewhere, and her stand-down phases have become more like pit stops; she spends more of that time on base in the augment bay being readied to go back out than in her own bunk. It means they can’t afford many moments like this. And just as well, it makes these moments precious.

“ _Roy_ Orbison,” she murmurs. “This singer was Roy Orbison.”

She looks back at Grace, who’s been watching her listen with delight.

They smile at each other like giddy kids, listening to a man who has been dead for more than half a century.

“You ever hear this song before?” she asks her.

“Uh… did a woman sing it at some point?” Grace asks, trying to chase a vague childhood memory somewhere specific.

Dani laughs.

“Probably. But this is the original I think.”

She extends a hand with a flourish.

“Would you like to dance?”

Grace laughs bashfully.

“I’m not a dancer Dani, you know that.”

Dani frowns.

“I should have showed you long ago then, that’s careless of me. Good a time as any to learn, come on.”

Grace shrugs, less nonchalantly than she'd hoped to, and approaches.

“You’re taller, so you’ll have to lead.”

“But I don’t know how?”

Dani laughs kindly.

“You just have to _look_ like you do, don't worry, I’ll show you.”

Dani comes in close against her, and places her hands for her. Grace lets her, but she's anxious and holds her arms rigidly where they've been put.

“You’re supposed to move forward, and I’ll move back. But I’ll move back, you just follow, I’ll guide you from there.”

Grace wasn’t kidding about not having learned to dance, and she’s not a natural. She’s nervous and embarrassed before they even start, and Dani can feel tension in her muscles. Dani waits for the right beat and they step into it. Awkwardly at first, Grace's movements are too uncertain and stiff, but the adjustment is quick - she can feel Grace relax around her and quickly start adapting to what she’s doing. She’s always been a fast learner; it’s a trait that seems to surprise people about her.

There are many things like that about Grace nobody else seems to understand or bother finding out. She is quiet, and guarded, and hard to get to know. Dani had the advantage of first meeting her in extreme circumstances – she got to skip some steps there simply wasn’t time for then. She has had years to get to know Grace since, get to know her again, and even she still finds herself surprised sometimes.

A long time ago, on the road, probably listening to music like this, Sarah asked her how she was going to feel if she did wind up having to send “her” Grace away in the end. She didn’t have an answer then.

The truth, it turns out, is more complicated than that; they are both her Graces. They always have been. She is sure of it. She is more sure of it every day, the more she falls in love with her. Whatever else might change or not change, in however many of these cycles have played out, she and Grace will remain each other’s constant.

They are both her Grace. They always have been. Their memories together come in the wrong order, that’s all.

She wishes she could tell Sarah all that now. But she wonders if she kind of knew anyway.

Grace picks up the basics quickly, but she's still perfecting the fine details. She is adept at watching Dani closely, but she’s always learned by feel more than anything else and that's what she's doing now.

She has a keen sense of her body, another thing few people seem to guess until the situation requires it - people are inclined to view her physicality as awkward or ungainly, but that’s not what it is at all. Nobody who have seen her in a fight would describe her with those words. She just wasn’t meant to stand around in parade lines or march around in formations; she is meant to be cut loose, she is meant to make things happen. Grace is meant to be unleashed, she is meant to let her strength and speed fill buildings and dominate landscapes, like a glorious force of nature. Grace is meant to happen to moments, not to watch them pass. She’s meant to make her courage, her care, her sense of right and wrong, physically real in the world.

Of course she looks uneasy doing useless things - her body revolts against wasting her like that.

And the more she gets a good feel for this, the more it seems to suit her after all. Once her nerves have settled, she can appreciate the closeness, the simple pleasure of moving in time together, and that seems to be the key. Her hands are at home on Dani’s body, and her feet are used to drills and movement; her intuition does the rest, and even in combat boots on a raw concrete floor, even in this small room, they’re not too bad by the time the song starts ending.

The music winds to a close, and there’s a long delay. Grace looks at Dani. Dani looks to the speakers, waiting to find out if there’s more to come.

Eventually, there's a crackle, and a distinctive guitar chord rings out; she recognizes the song two or three notes in. Another American song, another trucker radio staple.

She can’t remember the singer’s name, but the title is in the lyrics, the wicked game the man sings about. It’s a song for slow dancing. She reaches her arms up around Grace’s neck, and lays her head against her chest. Grace knows what to do out of instinct, because nothing else makes sense. She wraps her arms around Dani’s waist and bends in against her, and they move together softly, drinking in each other’s nearness as if their time left together can’t be measured in hours.

The singer croons about not wanting to fall in love, and the wicked dreams it’s meant for him, in a way Grace doesn’t think she’s meant to believe. She never understood that phrase anyway, falling in love – it never felt like a process for her. She doesn’t remember being anyone before it, or a time she felt it any less than she does now. She loves Dani. It’s not something that feels like a verb, and she never needed to learn how. It’s part of her, like atoms.

Dani can feel her close in around her more, so close she can feel all the heat of her body through the rough BDU shirt. Under it, she knows, Grace's skin is still unbranded by the tattoo she’ll put on her, her mark of Cain. She tries not to think of that. Under _that_ is every hope Dani has, the technology that might yet cost Grace’s life or save it. Dani thinks of that all the time.

There is a decent chance that this time next month, Dani will no longer exist and Grace will be dead. At least this Dani. She hopes against hope it won’t be so for this Grace, her Grace. She will send Grace, hoping this time the past will change, and knowing that if it does, it will never produce her. She will never have existed, and whatever Dani Ramos survives instead will be a stranger. A kind of painless, retrospective death – she doesn’t fear it.

She hasn’t told Grace any of this. She would revolt against it, in a way she didn’t when she was told what became of her in Dani’s memory, what Dani did to her once before and cannot bear to imagine again. Grace knows how much suffering is waiting for her in 2020, she knows she’ll almost certainly die, and that it won’t be clean. Dani knows she has the far better end of the bargain, and that Grace would never accept that - she needs Grace to change what happened, not surrender to the same fate for her sake.

She will send her back anyway. She will go anyway. Dani will do everything to avoid it, and it will happen anyway, and she’ll go.

She will send Grace back to a Dani who might still deserve her, who isn’t damned by all the decisions this one has had to make in twenty years of a war lost twenty two years ago. She will send her back in the hope that this time things will change enough not to happen again. She’ll send her back knowing how to slow dance, and hope _that_ Dani will get to see it some day, in that world. This world was only ever going to break their hearts.

Grace leans forward and they rest against each other’s foreheads gently, by now swaying to each other more than any music. From what she remembers, there's only a minute or so left in this song, and Dani feels each second slipping away like sand through an hourglass. 

She looks up at her, and Grace looks back down. She can see it in her eyes - they can both feel it starting to happen, they’re both starting to find ways to say goodbye to each other, starting to think about when they’ll start doing things that are for the last time together. Grace’s hand leaves Dani’s body and brings her up into a long, soft kiss just as the song ends, and they stay like that after the moody guitars have strummed a close. She feels Grace’s warmth, drinks in the smell of gun oil and strength unique to her body, and marvels at how many bits and pieces she’s had taken from or put into her body without losing an ounce of herself.

“What comes next?” Dani says, wishing she could have held onto that last song for four minutes more, settling for holding onto Grace a little tighter instead.

The pause between tracks feels longer than last time - the silence after it seems like an absence of something already, even though this room has never once had music in it before today.

“I don’t know,” Grace says truthfully.

Dani laughs.

She thinks, after all, of all the things they still might not know, or can’t predict about the next few weeks. She thinks of all the things she hopes will be the very first time.

That’s all they need, she must remember – one thing to happen for the first goddamn time, and after that everything changes. She thinks of all the years she’s spent trying to do everything she can that might be for the first time. She thinks of the years she spent before that with Sarah learning again and again and again that there can be a first time for everything. _For anything._

“Guess we’ll find out soon enough.”

They still have time for that. 


End file.
